Focus on Running Your Plant, Not Your SCADA System

Keeping drinking water flowing and maintaining proper wastewater processing for millions of Americans is no easy task. Municipalities around the country typically have numerous remote pump and water distribution stations that must operate reliably to properly distribute water and manage the treatment of wastewater. To ensure optimal operation, municipalities continue to iterate on the deployment of supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) systems that eliminate the need to have operators monitor each station in person around the clock. But, as with any technological advance, remote SCADA HMIs present new challenges for municipalities to manage and host these systems.

While municipalities have experts to manage water distribution and wastewater treatment, they do not always have in-house experts to maintain their SCADA system. As a result, important tasks such as performing upgrades that keep the system running efficiently or focusing on the security of data being transferred are not always a priority. Therefore, working with a third-party integrator that specializes in the implementation and hosting of fully-integrated SCADA systems, such as Lord & Company, can be a more time- and cost-effective approach versus trying to host and maintain your own SCADA system.

Figure 1. An illustration of how all the components of a SCADA system interact.

The Lord & Company Approach: SMS SCADA

Internet of Things (IoT) technology has presented a tremendous opportunity to further simplify SCADA system management and hosting, especially for water and wastewater municipalities. At Lord & Company, we’ve used our decades of experience, talent, and our commonsense approach to SCADA to develop a cost-effective and reliable SCADA HMI hosting solution. The goal of our approach is to make SCADA system HMIs more readily available, interactive, and easier to maintain. Our SMS SCADA solution is based on the following key components:

With SMS SCADA, users can easily remotely perform the following functions for any of their pump or water distribution stations:

Changing the mode, status, runtimes, and rates of all pumps

Reviewing current and past alarms

Adjusting setpoints

Making notes in the operator notebook

Analyzing trends and data

At Lord & Company, we understand that your time and focus should be on running your plant, not upgrading and maintaining your SCADA system. With SMS SCADA, you can let us take care of the never-ending hardware and software upgrades required to maintain and secure your SCADA system. With our approach based on familiar HMI software, cellular communication, and Cloud-based data storage, you can rest assured that you have a long-lasting, worry-free SCADA solution in place.